Learning a language by doing

My parents are starting a foreign language school where people can live with a family in their own home and learn English at their own pace absorbed within the environment of a home setting.

I did some mindmaps with "learn", "english" and "visit" coming up with many words that basically made the English out to be beer swilling, bowler hat wearing, tennis watchers whilst stuffing our faces with strawberries and cream. Although this isn't far from the truth I decided to simplify the initial ideas I had, as the ones I came up with seemed far too involved:

The gift of knowledge

Finding unexpected surprises

Meeting new friends

See things from a new perspective

I wanted to get across how you feel when you are learning a language through four emotions: confused, pensive, confident and triumph. Initially you are confused when trying to learn a language but you have to start somewhere, so anxiously you try what you learn and slowly gain confidence, then you realise you can do it and feel triumphant.

I decided to make some metaphor iconography showing these emotions as a narrative journey as well as an emotional one. So I decided to condense the process of learning a language into a scenario where someone wants to simply buy an ice cream.

I selected a couple of photos from a board on pinterest that I made to find illustrations and photos that I liked the colour combinations on.

As suggested by Dominic I began selecting some of the colours, trying a range of hue combinations. I decided to just use a four colour palette and try expanding it later.

I tried to get some consistency with how they felt with each other but still trying to convey the emotion. I want the negative emotions (confused, pensive) to feel slightly lacking something so pushed the saturation slightly on the positive emotions (confident, triumph). I also kept checking the contrast between each of the colours to hopefully minimise clashing colours that make your eye go all wavey.

I noticed that red definitely has a lot of weight to it when you greyscale the colours, anything with a lot of red is darker.